NABMSA Reviews a Publication of the North American British Music Studies Association

NABMSA Reviews A Publication of the North American British Music Studies Association

Vol. 6, No. 2 (Fall 2019) Ryan Ross, Editor

In this issue:

Steve Roud, Folk Song in England • Nicholas Jones, ed., Peter Maxwell Davies, Selected Writings • Katherine Butler and Samantha Bassler, eds., Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture • Phillip A. Cooke, The Music of James MacMillan • Deborah Heckert, Composing History: National Identities and the English Masque Revival, 1860-1920 • Berta Joncus, Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster • David Fallows, Henry V and the Earliest English Carols: 1413-1440 • David Forrest, Quinn Patrick Ankrum, Stacey Jocoy, and Emily Ahrens Yates, eds., Essays on Benjamin Britten from a Centenary Symposium • Julian Hellaby, The Mid-Twentieth-Century Concert Pianist: An English Experience

Steve Roud. Folk Song in England, with Music Chapters by Julia Bishop. London: Faber & Faber, 2017. xii, 764 pp. ISBN: 9780571309719 (hardback).

Few musical subjects are as contentious as folk song. From its obscure origins in an 18th-century Europe eager to fetishize the “wild” and “unruly” music of putative bards and “minstrels,” to its latter-day reinvention as the populist music of guitar-wielding activists in Greenwich Village, “folk song” has meant many things to many people. Writing on the subject, accordingly, has been anything but uniform, careening like a shuttlecock from one viewpoint to another. In England, opinions about the worth of the “First” Folk Revival (c. 1880-c.1940) have been particularly disputatious. The first generations of critics tended to praise the work of early collectors like Lucy Broadwood, Cecil Sharp and Ralph Vaughan Williams for its pioneering spirit (they were the first to collect songs in the field at all systematically) and for the “scientific rigor” with which they defined folk song as a “thing apart” from commercial popular and classical musics. But a new wave of critics during the “Second” Folk Revival after World War II, and especially since the mid-1970s, negated this judgment almost completely, arguing that the early collectors had fashioned an entirely subjective, and false, view of their subject, twisting the actual record of the people’s music to fit their bourgeois sensibility and authoritarian, class-based political agenda.

With Steve Roud’s Folk Song in England, the worm has turned yet again. Or rather, it has gone through the mill of the Hegelian dialectic and emerged on the other side with a quite reasonable synthesis of views that reflects the best from both schools of criticism. Thus does Roud, and his co-author Julia Bishop (who contributes two chapters on the music of folk song), argue for the great achievement of the early collectors—the enormous advance they brought to the study of a

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019 field which, before them, was a sporadic assemblage of antiquarian interests and inquiries—while also acknowledging their shortcomings and blind spots. Among the latter was an undue focus on the tunes, not the texts, of the songs, and an insufficient interest in the singers themselves and the social contexts in which they learned, performed, and transmitted this music. Their romantic view of the “folk” as “primitive” and untainted by the modern world likewise caused them to underestimate the impact of printed sources—broadsides, chapbooks, and other forms of street literature—and of urban performance venues like the 18th-century pleasure garden and the 19th- century musical hall on the origins and evolution of traditional singing and song repertories. And yet, as Roud points out, the early collectors were fundamentally right to look for “tradition” amongst the rural working classes, where people were most likely to make music among themselves without constant resort to print. And the sheer delight they showed in the skill of the best traditional singers (from whom they collected again and again) testifies to their interest in the beauty, and not just the ideological uses, of this music.

Not that Roud is concerned only to rehabilitate the early collectors. Rather, his book is a thoroughgoing investigation of “folk song,” in idea and practice, throughout 500 years of English history. If the early collectors naturally come to the fore, this is because it was they who put the subject on the map and laid the foundation for modern study. The book is divided into three large sections. Part I is devoted to the history of folk song scholarship in England from the mid-18th century onward, and traces the move from a purely literary focus on old printed song and ballad texts to a slow recognition of a still-active folk tradition (texts and tunes) worthy of being collected. Here, the infighting among the early collectors, as well as the efforts of post-1945 scholarship to refine and expand their definitions, are duly canvassed and assessed. Part II tests Roud’s assertion that, properly considered, the “folk repertory” consists of far more (and many newer) types of songs than the early collectors allowed. He effects this by surveying various forms of popular music from the 16th to the 20th centuries, noting moments where such music came into contact with and was transformed by the “folk process,” as well as where it was not. Impressive here is the sheer range of topics—everything from the role of the itinerant (and much abused) ballad singer in song dissemination to the astonishing growth of the popular music industry in the 19th and 20th centuries—while the descriptive and especially investigative detail shown specific manuscript sources is striking. The scrutiny is necessary given the opacity of written sources— the only kind we have, after all, at least until the advent of sound recordings—to yield up the secrets of oral musical practice. Part III focuses on the details of the “folk process” itself, touching on street literature, local singing communities and traditions, tune families and melodic variation (contributed by Julia Bishop), as well as on a host of unique song repertories (work, sailor, soldier, dialect, bawdy), each of which is considered separately. I especially appreciated a chapter on religious singing in church, chapel, and home. This is a complex topic—certainly an understudied one—and Roud weaves together Church history, developments in mainstream religious music, and the workings of the folk process to paint a compelling picture of the rich interactions between different levels of society and education.

Clearly, Roud knows his subject. He, in fact, is the creator of the “Roud Folk Song Index,” an online database of nearly 25,000 English-language songs collected from oral tradition (the project began in the 1970s and is still expanding). One of the many strengths of the book is the constant reference it makes to specific songs and their variants, all of them searchable using the Index (currently available for free on the website of the Vaughan Williams Memorial Library of the English Folk Dance and Song Society). The sheer volume of the data is remarkable and gives Roud an interpretive advantage over earlier scholars, as when he problematizes recent arguments that the songs sung by hop-pickers in 20th-century Kent and East Sussex expressed a uniform opposition to harsh working conditions. Showing that some of the songs in question are

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019 parodies of jaunty music hall songs, Roud suggests that, for some hop-pickers at least, the song repertory had a more purely recreational and less obviously political purpose, and in fact served to reconcile workers to their situation in what social historians have called a “culture of consolation.” Roud’s corrective is unsurprising given the over-romanticized view of workers’ culture as the scourge of capitalist oppression so often met with in the left-leaning folk song scholarship of the past forty years. But he is no less hesitant to emend questionable right-leaning opinions as well, like those of the First Revival’s collectors whose “folk” idealizations often got mixed up with notions of racial purity and a somewhat chauvinistic promotion of English art music. In short, Roud’s truck is with methodological sloppiness of any sort, whether ideologically motivated or not, and it is no exaggeration to say that, thanks to a superior analysis born of his fabulous Index and a synoptic knowledge of the literature (and not just in folk song studies), he has successfully and improbably imposed a convincing unity on a very convoluted historiography and subject. Add in an exceedingly clear and unfussy prose style and the result is a balanced, comprehensive, and extremely readable study that promises to carry the field for a long time to come.

Still, the central feature of the book, Roud’s expanded definition of “folk song,” has the potential to excite controversy. He implies as much in his Afterward (really a kind of Apologia) where he somewhat nervously restates his thesis that a “folk song” is defined less by its age or origin than by the process by which any song, of whatever provenance, enters oral tradition and is transformed over time, acquiring a new shape, a new sound, new performers, and new audiences along the way. His caution is understandable, as the broadening threatens to undermine the very idea of folk music by potentially collapsing the borders between folk, pop, and classical. He need not have worried. He is far from the first to make the claim—Georgina Boyes, Ian Russell, David Atkinson and others in the English folk song world have been moving towards this point for decades—though his is the most comprehensive and authoritative to date. Moreover, the definition, very carefully sculpted and elucidated over nearly 700 pages, keeps the borders well intact, merely suggesting a greater permeability between them. If there is an occasional blurring of categories and inconsistency of method—as when he validates Cecil Sharp’s rejection of songs of known authorship only to chart elsewhere many examples of such songs entering into folk tradition, or when he grants folk status to some song collections compiled by semi-literate persons but not to others—this is an inevitable consequence of a very tricky subject, especially in this broadened context. Indeed, to the extent that such inconsistencies are the inevitable consequence of Roud’s wholesale enrichment of the entire conversation about folk song in England, we must needs welcome them.

JULIAN ONDERDONK West Chester University of Pennsylvania

Nicholas Jones, ed. Peter Maxwell Davies, Selected Writings. Music Since 1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. xv, 332 pp. ISBN: 9781107157996 (hardback).

Sir Peter Maxwell Davies (1934-2016) once opened a speech by acknowledging, “As a musician, words don't come as easily as music and when I have to take stock of my thoughts and express

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019 them in words…[It’s] just a little bit removed away from your normal mode of thinking.”1 This new collection of Davies’s writings belies the diffidence of that confession. Davies was an extraordinarily precise and incisive author, voicing opinions on topics ranging from his own musical style, to the value of music education, to the role of music in society at large.

This collection is not the first time editor Nicholas Jones has advocated for approaching Davies as an author as well as a composer. Jones’s contribution to the 2009 volume Peter Maxwell Davies Studies (published by Cambridge University Press) examined Davies’s writings from the 1950s, when the latter was a composer embarking on his musical vocation. Peter Maxwell Davies, Selected Writings expands that premise to include the composer’s whole career: as a student, as the enfant terrible of the 1960s and 1970s, and as the mature, Orkney- based symphonist who came to represent the British musical establishment, however uncomfortably that mantle sometimes sat.

Jones arranges these writings chronologically into three sections: “From Manchester to Hoy, 1934-1970,” “From Hoy to Sandy, 1971-1997,” and “Sanday, 1998-2016.” These divisions correspond to key moments in Davies’s biography: his early career, his surprising decision to move to the remote Orkney island of Hoy, and his final years on the slightly more accessible island, Sanday. Jones includes roughly the same amount of material for each section, which means Davies’s student days and early career receive an unexpected degree of attention. This formative period, however, often receives short shrift in other Davies studies.

The primary appeal of this volume is its variety of materials. In addition to Davies’s program notes for both his own and others’ works, the book contains freestanding essays and letters-to-the- editor. These include Davies’s early polemics castigating the state of British music education, and his memorial tributes to colleagues like Benjamin Britten and Michael Tippett. Transcripts of radio interviews provide insight into how Davies answered on-the-spot questions regarding his own musical development and compositional praxis.

What the volume mostly does not contain are private or personal materials, such as letters or diary entries, since these resources are not yet available to the public. The exception is “Notes from a Cold Climate,” which present excerpts from Davies’s journal of his trip to Antarctica, where he gathered inspiration for his Eighth Symphony (commissioned by the British Antarctic Survey). But these entries are not a personal diary, as Davies wrote them knowing they would be printed to publicize the symphony.

A second strength of the collection is the inclusion of significant amounts of material not readily available elsewhere, particularly for readers outside of the United Kingdom. Of the 74 selections, I could easily retrieve only 21 from my institution’s print and online journal holdings. Another 29 items are program notes or other commentaries from Davies’s now-defunct professional website,

1 “Is Anybody Listening? Reflections on the Composer’s Relationship with Society Today,” lecture for the British Library’s “Stefan Zweig Series,” May 1995, transcription accessed 3 February 2013 at www.maxopus.com.

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019 maxopus.com. Retrieving materials from maxopus.com is possible, thanks to the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, but it is nevertheless a hassle.

This leaves 24 items, fully a third of the collection, that are unobtainable without planning a research trip to an archive like the British Library. These include interview transcripts and unpublished documents. Item 73, “Indivisible Parameters and Spirit-Stirring Amalgams,” is especially noteworthy, as it was commissioned especially for this volume and can be found nowhere else. In what might be considered a “late style” document, Davies reviews his changing understanding of harmony, rhythm, and form, and also touches on matters that dogged his career: his move to Orkney, his attitude towards religion, and his sexuality. Personally, I would have preferred the percentage of inaccessible material to skew even higher, but that may have been impracticable, given Jones’s stated goal of showcasing the “variety and balance” of Davies’s many writings over the course of his six-decade career (2).

To that end, Jones carefully selects writings with themes that recur across those decades, particularly Davies’s interest in music education, both for professional composers and for schoolchildren. Another recurring theme is the parallel between architecture and musical form, in which hidden equations and proportions support the immediate outer beauty of the building or music. In addition, Jones includes several essays highlighting aspects of Davies’s work that to date have received little scholarly attention, such as his interest in Indian and Aboriginal musics, or the ways in which his homosexuality influenced his career and compositions.

Davies’s writings are not always useful as detailed theoretical analyses of his works. The older he got, the less inclined Davies seemed to be to explain his formal procedures to his audiences in all but the broadest terms. Nor do these writings include many point-by-point descriptions of the compositional process for individual pieces, particularly the later works. This is unsurprising; Davies’s manuscript drafts are by-and-large very clean documents, and he himself suggested that most of his compositional work happened in his head, not on paper.

But if this collection is of limited direct use for theorists and analysts, it remains priceless for music historians. For those concerned with Davies himself, Jones’s updated bibliography of the composer’s writings and interviews will be a helpful resource. In addition, scholars interested in the state of art music during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries will appreciate Davies’s insider look at the aesthetic and pragmatic concerns of a contemporary British composer. In this way, the unique content of the volume’s individual selections combine to make Peter Maxwell Davies, Selected Writings a quasi-autobiography of a major figure in British music.

KAREN J. OLSON Gaylord Music Library , Washington University in St. Louis

Katherine Butler and Samantha Bassler, eds. Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2019. xiv, 318 pp. ISBN: 9781783273713 (hardback).

Readers of Boethius’s De institutione musica will remember that the treatise does not begin with a set of musical definitions, nor with his famous tripartite division of musicians. Rather, he starts with a series of mytho-historical stories about music’s power, many centered on Pythagoras but

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019 including also Terpander, Arion, Empedocles, and others. Such narrative framing is endemic in representations of music throughout the Medieval and Early Modern periods. Moreover, as the fifteen essays in Music, Myth and Story in Medieval and Early Modern Culture show, musical myths are not merely the province of speculative treatises or poems about music. Rather, stories about music permeate nearly every musical form in the period, including philosophical treatises, visual emblems, defenses of music, theatrical performances, madrigals, songs, and opera. As a result, this collection, edited by Katherine Butler and Samantha Bassler, shows how myths about music—and myths set to music—made it possible for music to function in a wide variety of intellectual, social, political, and cultural contexts.

The essays are organized into seven topic-based sections, which range from “Myth in Medieval Music Theory and Philosophy” to “Re-Imagining Myths and Stories for the Stage.” In practice, however, the section divisions are less useful than the titles of the essays themselves, which frequently extend beyond their sectional boundaries and overlap productively with the other essays. One of the through-lines in the collection is the fluid relationship between classical and Christian stories about music. Medieval and early modern writers frequently drew on these accounts of music, often in an attempt to arbitrate their relative authority. Jason Stoessel’s meticulously researched essay, “The Harmonious Blacksmith, Lady Music, and Minerva: The Iconography of Secular Song in the Late Middle Ages,” traces the medieval figure of Musica as it developed from the allegorical representation of Harmony in Martianus Capella’s De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii to the iconographical representation of Minerva in fourteenth-century Italy and France. Stoessel shows how late medieval images of Musica often incorporate the related iconography of the blacksmith, a figure that evokes two competing stories of music’s discovery: Pythagoras and the biblical Tubalcain (sometimes identified as Tubal or Jubal). Such “cross-fertilisation,” as Stoessel terms it, could sometimes be genial, as a way of emphasizing music’s dual status as both a mathematical and mechanical art. At other times, the distinction between a classical Pythagoras and a biblical Tubalcain is more fraught, particularly when music is the target of Reformist attacks. Katherine Butler’s excellent essay, “Origin Myths, Genealogies and Inventors: Defining the Nature of Music in Early Modern England,” traces the various histories of music in the English laus musicae tradition, noting how biblical histories of music often served as a defense against Reformist critiques. Interestingly, Butler also shows how English histories of music gradually shift from God-centered origins to human-centered ones. Like many of the essays in the collection, Butler’s is particularly useful in bringing attention to obscure or seldom-discussed primary sources.

As might be expected, Ovid figures prominently in the collection, largely because his account of Orpheus in the Metamorphoses was the most well-known version of the myth in the period, but also because he was an important source for many other popular stories about music. Tim Shepherd’s and Patrick McMahon’s essay, “Foolish Midas: Representing Musical Judgement and Moral Judgement in Italy c. 1520,” shows how Italian Renaissance writers and artists conflated Ovid’s Midas and Marsyas stories, not only in an attempt to establish standards of musical taste but also to reinforce class-based and gender-based norms of social judgement. Ljubica Ilic’s essay, “In Pursuit of Echo: Sound, Space and the History of the Self,” attests to the influence of Ovid’s pairing of Echo and Narcissus, an innovation on the myth that prompted early modern writers, such as Athanasius Kircher, to see Echo as the “image of a voice.” Ilic points to a number

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019 of early modern musical “echo pieces,” suggesting provocatively that the allegorical and mythographical meanings of Echo enables these musical echoes to function as a species of “auditory metaphors,” raising complex philosophical questions and creating self-reflexive moments in the music. As with Ovid’s Echo, many of the musical episodes in the Metamorphoses thematize the precarious status of the female voice. In this vein, Sigrid Harris’s essay, “Dangerous Beauty: Stories of Singing Women in Early Modern Italy,” analyzes the stories of Philomela, Circe, and Sirens as vehicles for the expression of male anxiety over femininity and female performance. The essay’s last (and, in my opinion, most interesting) section discusses early modern Italian female singers who used these same stories of dangerous feminine music as a vehicle for their own authority.

One of the most important facts to emerge from the collection is the extent to which stories about music directly affected and shaped practices of musical composition and performance. In other words, musical myths did not operate only as representations of music. The essays by Ilic, Bassler, Harris, and Katie Bank point to specific musical compositions and performances that were structured (at least partly) by stories, while other essays in the collection reveal story’s influence on broader theories of composition and performance. John MacInnis’s “Music and the Myth of Apollo’s Grove” shows how the ninth-century music theorist Eriugena drew on Capella’s allegorical representation of music to justify his own innovative model of tetrachords. Likewise, Férdia J. Stone-Davis’s essay, “The Consolation of Philosophy and the ‘Gentle’ Remedy of Music,” argues that Boethius’s allegorical representations of music in the Consolation of Philosophy inform and explain his theory of the modes in his Fundamentals of Music. In a quite different context, Jamie Agpar’s essay, “How to Sing Like Angels: Isaiah, Ignatius of Antioch and Protestant Worship in England,” considers how Reformist debates over antiphonal singing were shaped by interpretations of biblical stories of angelic singing. In the process, Agpar shows that musical myths informed theological arguments, while Reformism itself affected the interpretation of these myths.

The last two essays in the collection focus on some of the most sophisticated examples of the mercurial relationship between myth and music. Erica Levenson’s essay, “Translating Myth Through Tunes: Ebenezer Forrest’s Ballad Opera Adaptation of Louis Fuzelier’s Momus Fabuliste (1719–29),” reads Forrest’s ballad opera adaptation of a French play as a demonstration of how dramatic music could be used to produce political and social satire. Amanda Eubanks Winkler’s “‘Armida’s Picture we from Tasso Drew’?: The Rinaldo and Armida Story in Late Seventeenth- Century and Early Eighteenth-Century English Operatic Entertainments” considers English operatic adaptations of Tasso’s epic, particularly in light of Restoration debates over music, theater, and national identity. Both of these excellent essays reveal that myths and stories not only provided opera with subjects—they offered composers a variety of ways in which to explore music’s ability to tell stories.

Despite the vast range of genres, media, literary periods, and national traditions covered by the essays, Butler and Bassler’s collection is remarkably coherent in its focus on myth and music. The essays, which have been well edited, frequently refer to each other and indicate multiple points of inter-scholarly contact. This is a nicely produced edition that features a comprehensive index and bibliography, as well as ten attractive full-color plates. While musical myths have been a longstanding topic of literary and historical inquiry, this collection suggests numerous possibilities for future research on the topic.

JOSEPH M. ORTIZ University of Texas at El Paso

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019

Phillip A. Cooke. The Music of James MacMillan. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2019. x, 289 pp. ISBN: 9781783273706 (hardback).

Writing a biography on a living subject has its challenges, as Phillip A. Cooke observes in the opening sentences of his volume on Scottish composer James MacMillan—the first scholarly examination of one of today’s most prominent compositional voices. Lacking a substantial corpus of musicological research with which to engage, the author (a composer by trade) must draw on other resources to achieve diversity of perspective. It is thus through interviews with MacMillan, MacMillan’s own writings, program and liner notes, media programs, critical reviews, musical analysis, and the occasional scholarly commentary that Cooke embarks upon the ambitious task of crafting his portrait.

The resulting book is a comprehensive and enlightening study of the composer, interweaving biography and analysis with strands of religion, culture, and politics. It is also one that distinctly privileges breadth over depth. Cooke covers a broad range of compositions to highlight several of MacMillan’s stylistic calling cards: atonality and avant-garde elements, alongside more modal/tonal features; pervasive borrowings from Scottish, Celtic, and Catholic traditions; a highly gestural/ornamental language; and strong dramatic impulses. His attention to biography similarly operates in broad strokes, addressing (but not dwelling on) major circumstances in MacMillan’s life through personal anecdotes and media reports. MacMillan’s Catholic faith, his transformations in political outlook, and his complex relationship with his Scottish heritage are additionally given due consideration.

Cooke stresses in his introduction that the book is not an analytical study per se, but rather “a look at the composer’s most important pieces, viewed through the lens of his life, beliefs and aesthetics” (xviii). Even so, analysis is clearly central to the project, a methodological approach that reflects Cooke’s own background as a composer. Chapter titles emphasize work titles as milestones; within each chapter, individual pieces are spotlighted with appropriate subheadings for focused study.

Proceeding in broadly chronological fashion, Cooke follows a standard format for each of his ten chapters, which intermingle biographical details, commentary (from MacMillan and others) on experiences and impressions both musical and non-musical, and analysis of select works. His approach to treating individual pieces additionally tends to follow its own common template: a discussion of circumstances that germinated the composition, followed by a blow-by-blow account of important musical details and a summary of critical reaction.

The various analyses are among the book’s most valuable features. Cooke clearly knows MacMillan’s music intimately, and he brings perceptive insights into the composer’s priorities across wide-ranging repertory. He is especially adept at uncovering MacMillan’s recycling of musical ideas, vividly illustrating how later works often have firm foundations in earlier ones. A clear sense also emerges of the profoundly divergent source materials found in MacMillan’s

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019 oeuvre: motives from his own music as well as that of other composers past and present, along with Scottish folksong and Catholic plainsong, all appear with striking regularity. At the same time, Cooke weaves MacMillan’s individual works into a larger organic narrative by developing different cultural frames (religious, political, national) through which they can be understood. These large- scale constructs, while adding important context, can sometimes come across as reductive or even contradictory, as for instance when Seven Last Words from the Cross is described as “the beginning of a new period of MacMillan’s compositional career, one which reflected further on the composer’s faith and carried on many of the themes that had propelled him to recognition in the previous four years” (82).

Cooke’s analyses are predicated upon the reader having a fair level of musical literacy. Frequent musical examples in the text usefully demonstrate how MacMillan’s thematic motives relate to their models, although other passages in which he references bar numbers to scores without providing the actual score examples can prove frustrating. Yet his overall writing style leans toward the more general reader, with conclusions that can be somewhat vaguely formed (e.g., of The Confession of Isobel Gowdie [1990] he states, “the music’s ability to provoke reactions both pro and contra is part of its strength and part of MacMillan’s appeal as a composer” [54]). Descriptions of individual works sometimes read like a travelogue of major events from beginning to end, as if Cooke is writing program notes rather than a scholarly biography. He also indulges in occasional moments of apotheosizing, as in for instance the opening of Chapter 2: “1988 would turn out to be a pivotal year for James MacMillan, one that saw the emergence of the composer he is today” (21). Personal criticisms of MacMillan’s music are presented gently, or else left to the words of professional critics who have reviewed the works in question.

At other times, however, Cooke’s large-scale assertions are considerably more thoughtful. He finds in The Confession of Isobel Gowdie, for instance, a distinctive nexus of cultural, political, and religious influences in both musical style and extra-musical contexts, and recognizes its pivotal position in terms of bringing MacMillan’s Catholicism to the fore despite lacking a particular liturgical context. Similar complexities emerge in the percussion concerto Veni, Veni, Emmanuel (1992), whose title and overt Christmastime plainsong references mask a more subtle progression from Advent to Easter as a longing for the Second Coming.

Considering the deep resonances of MacMillan’s infamous 1999 “Scotland’s shame” speech, a polemic against the nation’s anti-Catholic sentiments, Cooke connects the divisive reactions toward this monologue to the composer’s political turn toward conservatism (expressed most vividly in a 2008 article for The Spectator in which he declares, “I hope to God I don’t see myself described as a liberal left-winger again” [126]) and his doubling down on faith-based music, which in the succeeding decade would become more predominant. Hand in hand with this increasing Catholic focus is what Cooke identifies as MacMillan’s “choral renaissance,” which he further situates amid a larger contemporary shift toward “a softer, more traditional, tonal language, possibly as a reaction to the high modernism of the 1960s-1980s” (136). (This was a period which MacMillan himself characterized as a “macho modernism that didn’t really rate choral music” [136- 137].)

Physically, the book is well put-together. The music examples are easy to read and interact well with the narrative, and the layout affords enough white space to be easy on the eyes. A thorough works list, with useful information on premieres and recordings, serves as a helpful reference tool. In terms of visual plates, the book offers only five black-and-white photographs of MacMillan; additional images might have been desirable, such as illustrations of the landscapes and churches that have proven so influential on the composer.

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019

For scholars, this volume should prove most valuable as a baseline study upon which later research can build. Those seeking in-depth explorations of a particular work might be disappointed with Cooke’s more restricted (though undoubtedly tantalizing) presentation of analytical and cultural material. Nevertheless, Cooke has done a very valuable service in terms of offering many thought-provoking ideas on MacMillan’s music from across his career. With this foundation now being laid, it remains for future researchers to branch out in new directions.

JOSEPH SARGENT University of Alabama

Deborah Heckert. Composing History: National Identities and the English Masque Revival, 1860-1920. Woodbridge, UK: Boydell Press, 2018. ix, 238 pp. ISBN 9781783272075 (hardback).

In this volume, Deborah Heckert examines the creation of English national identity through the English Masque Revival during the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Late-nineteenth-century connections of English national identity to a nostalgia-laden idea of England in the distant past—specifically to the Tudors and the Stuarts—helped to reinvigorate interest in the masque both as a historical object and as a lavish entertainment of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Heckert begins with ideas from now-classic scholarship— Hobsbawm’s and Ranger’s The Invention of Tradition (1983) and Anderson’s Imagined Communities (1991)—as the framework for her inquiry. She notes that “To a large extent citizens were free to pick and choose which among many versions of England they upheld, so long as they clearly identified that version as having a metonymic relationship with a larger England, however elusive, and responded appropriately” (13). In short, it mattered less which England citizens could imagine themselves belonging to, so long as they could imagine themselves as part of the greater national community. She then proceeds to investigate historical accounts of the masque (and their biases), and how those versions of history served the construction of an English national music. From the introduction, she maintains an exquisite balance between context and analysis.

Heckert opens her first chapter with the performance of Ben Jonson’s Pan’s Anniversary in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1905 as an illustration of the kind of pleasant pageantry that audiences traveling to the Stratford festival would have expected to see. She notes that “the widening popular fascination with England’s “golden’ age,” and the history of this festival in particular, make “a fascinating story of the period’s urge to manufacture, and to commercialize, history” (3). Chapter Two focuses on the musical image of history in the Victorian masque, and Chapter Three on historiography and the masque’s revival. Together, they illustrate the tension between the modern and the historical. Heckert writes that “composers and librettists drew from models of the past to lend a sense of historical continuity and to link to a previously established set of tropes and

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019 associations, and yet they reflected a particularly modern sensibility about both music and society in their goals of education and progress” (74). Modernism, then, became a movement of resistance against the discourses fixated on, and the desire to privilege, the past. Heckert’s discussion incorporates criticism of musicologists’ historical revisions, as well as apologetics from the 1890s for the masque as a foundational component of English national identity. (88)

The author also gives due credit to Hubert Parry’s historiographical work on English music. Parry was, as she describes, “well educated and well read, and intimate with new trends in philosophy, history, aesthetics, and literature, all of which he brought to the task of writing music history” (89). His status as a composer, as well as that of a historian and pedagogue, gave him an incredible breadth of knowledge from which he formed his perspective. In the midst of Parry’s writing and scholarly work on seventeenth-century music came the Purcell Revival, which led to this figure’s subsequent elevation to the status of “greatest English historical composer.” This single event probably did the most to legitimize the masque as a genre for early twentieth-century composers wishing to connect with the English past. That some of Purcell’s masques had been popular legitimized the form even more. Heckert treats both Parry’s and others’ opinions of Purcell at length in her discussion of the revival, and rightly so: the latter is a mythologized figure, and much of the national musical narrative relied upon ideas of him as a person of “genius.”

Chapters Four, Five, and Six discuss the masque in the folk revival and pageant culture, its engagements with modernist ideas, England’s legacy of imperialism, the aftermath of the First World War, and composers’ changing ideas on the role of art in society. Vaughan Williams in particular ascribed to William Morris’s aspirations for art and beauty to be a part of everyday life, and that social transformation could and would occur when everyday people had the same opportunity to create them (148).

Morris’s philosophy correlates with Vaughan Williams’s and other composers’ desires to revive the masques of the seventeenth century in a festival setting. The original masques were largely accessible only to the elite, but members of the English Musical Renaissance could appropriate the historical musical idioms for their music, minus the outmoded elitism. Heckert lays out four historiographic preconditions that the masque and its scholarship needed to meet in order to contend for the title of national genre: “the identification of the masque as a genre with purely English sources; the identification of this genre as one that competed on equal terms with new musical innovations on the continent during the seventeenth century; the forged connection with Henry Purcell as the primary forerunner of the new movement in English music; and the incorporation of the folk into a conception of viable source material” (109). By 1914, these preconditions had been met. The First World War and its aftermath (covered in Chapter 6, 153– 196) then changed composers’ priorities completely, bringing the folk and the “re-invention” of English national tradition into the spotlight.

To conclude, Composing History is a work that I did not know I had been looking for until I encountered it. Heckert’s writing is clear, concise, and structured with the reader in mind. There are enough layers of history and extra-musical context here to satisfy even the most well-read historian of English music. The accompanying theoretical analysis nicely supports the book’s thesis while also offering explanations for some larger trends in British music of the period. It is a joy to read such a well-constructed history.

KATHLEEN McGOWAN University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019

Berta Joncus. Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster. Woodbridge, UK: The Boydell Press, 2019. xiii, 527 pp. ISBN: 9781783273461 (hardback).

“Who was Kitty Clive?” This question opens the first chapter of Berta Joncus’s new monograph, Kitty Clive, or The Fair Songster. The answer has puzzled scholars of the eighteenth-century London stage for decades, and it is the driving force behind this study. In The Fair Songster, Joncus follows the career and shifting identity of singer and actress Kitty Clive, from her debut on the stage as the young and “dazzling” Catherine Raftor in 1728, through her dubious marriage of convenience to George Clive in 1733, and finally to her rapid decline in popularity during the 1740s. Joncus traces Clive’s identity as it transformed over her career, considering the ways the singer presented and re-presented herself both to suit the needs of her London audiences and to mold how she was perceived by them.

Berta Joncus, who has written previously on representations of Kitty Clive and other London stage actresses in the eighteenth century, gives us a deeply detailed and carefully contextualized account of Clive’s life and career that both engages with, and looks beyond, primary source materials. The author situates herself among other scholars who have shown Clive to be an important figure as both an actress and writer of stage productions, but asserts that one element of her career has not yet been properly considered: her song. Joncus states that Clive, who excelled in singing genres ranging from broadside ballads to opera arias, has historically confounded musicologists, who had no framework with which to study the singer-actress’s varied and seemingly contradictory styles of vocal production. Additionally, the author claims that Clive has been marginalized in musical discussion of eighteenth-century London because so much of her repertory came from the humble origins of street songs, a genre which, until recently, was largely overlooked due to its consistent lack of proper authorship and its reputation as a low-class genre.

Joncus’s main narrative thrust follows Kitty Clive’s career through consideration of her song repertoire. As Joncus explains, Clive rose to the height of London stardom performing the works of Handel, Henry Fielding, and David Garrick, each of whom wrote specifically for her voice. This book, which is largely about Clive as a songster, concludes with her “descent” into the performance of her own negative stereotypes, and the recession of serious song from her repertory in the late-1740s. Joncus’s secondary focus is how Clive made and marketed herself, and particularly how the singer-actress used song to aid in the production and maintenance of her public identity. Clive’s self-constructed persona constantly evolved as she took on new stage vehicles, or roles, and as London’s political and theatrical scenes shifted around her. At different points in her career, Clive assumed the public identities of “comic muse” and “Patriot soprano,” while after a series of public scandals later in her career she would be referred to as a “Red-Fac’d B[it]ch” by the same press that had once lauded her. Joncus delves deeply into the web of primary sources surrounding Clive’s life, including scores, wordbooks, press commentary, iconography, and Clive’s own writings, challenging how her image has historically been transmitted. Joncus

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019 takes additional care to look beyond the sources themselves, constructing her argument through an investigation of what those sources omit, as well as what they say. This point is critical, considering not only Clive’s fastidious monitoring of her own public image, but the inherent biases of eighteenth-century writers as they encountered this highly successful professional woman upon whom London’s public eye was fixed.

Joncus’s book is constructed chronologically, each chapter taking on a several-year period of Clive’s career and drawing attention to the most important relationship, conflict, or political shift that aided in her rise to (or fall from) popularity during that period. It presents not only a biographical account of its subject’s life, but also a carefully fleshed-out vision of the London stage scene. Joncus's detailed contextualization of Clive's career within the constantly changing bounds of both London's theatrical community and broader political shifts is one of the strongest aspects of her work, though it sometimes comes at the cost of sacrificing narrative clarity and argumentative flow. This book includes a thorough bibliography of primary and secondary sources, as well as several appendices that include transcriptions of Clive’s own writing and an account of every role she played between 1728 and 1769.

In sum, Joncus’s treatment of Kitty Clive’s career allows a detailed painting of the eighteenth- century London stage scene, with Clive at its heart, to emerge. Kitty Clive, or the Fair Songster is a significant addition to recent scholarship for any researcher interested in both Clive herself and the world in which she lived.

RACHEL M. BANI Florida State University

David Fallows. Henry V and the Earliest English Carols: 1413-1440. Abington and New York: Routledge, 2018. xiv, 207 pp. ISBN: 9781472421920 (hardback).

In this monograph, following 55 years of reflection, David Fallows provides refreshingly new perspectives concerning the genre of the English carol from the early 15th century. While there have been a number of recordings of these works from 1953, when Noah Greenberg must have obtained a copy of John Steven’s 1952 edition of those carols preserved with music in Musica Britannica 4, to 2012, when the ensemble Obsidian produced a complete recording in Middle English of the Trinity carol roll (Obsidian CD709), there has been little significant scholarly research. It is to his credit that Fallows is able, in this concise volume, to take a critical look at all of the previous scholarship and even reflect the changes from his own earlier discussions of these works. As he notes in his first chapter, he “also felt sure that scholars had not just underestimated the repertory but, more serious, quite overlooked its true place in the story of western music” (1). Part of this reflection, important for his consideration for re-dating the musical sources, is that of the hundred or so manuscripts used by Richard L. Greene for his critical edition (The Early English Carols, 1935, second

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019 revised edition, 1977), very few date from before about 1420.

In the opening chapters, Fallows reestablishes the basic parameters of an English carol. He clarifies his distinction between the defining formal element of a carol, the “burden”, which occurs before and after each stanza and a refrain, which in his view is a repeating word or phrase that may be within or conclude each stanza. He further details the differences between the English carols and other contemporary songs with refrains, such as the French virelai, termed “caroles” by Charles d’Orléans.

Perhaps the core of Fallows’s work is his reexamination of the dating for the four manuscripts that include music for the English carols. For each, he critically reflects on earlier scholarship (including his own) but then provides new hypotheses based upon a broader contextual study of each source’s codicology and a much subtler examination of musical style. Rather than ca. 1510, the Ritson manuscript most likely dates from the early 1440s, but, based upon his research on the other three sources, he believes that the traditional dating for the complex Selden manuscript (1435-1440) is essentially correct.

Fallows’s more significant conclusions concern the Trinity Roll, which he dates to the early years of Henry V’s reign, and the Egerton manuscript, which he argues should not be dated much later than 1430. Based upon this, he is able to place many of the earlier carols in the context of Henry V’s French campaigns, the employment of English in the King’s speeches in 1416, and the institution of using English in official communications beginning in 1417 (161-162).

Fallows also argues that the English carols may have been a significant influence on the transfer of the so-called “countenance Anglois” to the continent in the early fifteenth century (174). He expresses the “strong suspicion” that the music for many of the carols may have been written by John Dunstable (178). Based on his extensive research of early fifteenth-century music, Fallows reexamines the music of the carols in relation to continental styles, such as fauxbourdon, and notes the use of passages from the Ritson carol, Pray for us thou Prince of Peace, in a Credo attributed to Gilles Binchois (124-25).

There are a few blemishes in this otherwise excellent study. One is the confusing shift between terminology (“bars” verses “beats”) used for the phrase lengths that are important to Fallows’s examination of the musical style for the English carols. Fallows also asserts that the unwritten dance music of the Middle Ages must have had regular phrase lengths (53), but this is supported neither by the few notated examples of medieval dance music nor even by the traditional folk dances of Europe that still may have irregular phrases. The significance of Fallows’s monograph is clear, however: it provides a needed critical reexamination of the English carol, showing it to be a significant genre in the complex political and musical world of the early fifteenth century.

CHARLES E. BREWER Florida State University

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019

David Forrest, Quinn Patrick Ankrum, Stacey Jocoy, and Emily Ahrens Yates, eds. Essays on Benjamin Britten from a Centenary Symposium. United Kingdom: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017. xi, 324 pp. ISBN: 9781443886130 (hardback).

Essays on Benjamin Britten from a Centenary Symposium is the result of the “Benjamin Britten: A Century of Inspiration” conference held at the Texas Tech University School of Music in celebration of the composer’s birth centenary. This symposium included scholarly paper presentations alongside live performances and lecture recitals. The editors sought to synthesize both of these elements in one print volume: a series of articles derived from the conference in the first section, and a succession of program notes and lecture recital papers in the second. This review will address the former.

In the volume’s introduction, David Forrest focuses on the issue of ambiguity versus conflict in the existing musicological discourse on Britten’s compositional style. Ambiguity here refers to an underdetermined norm, or a lack of information to define the governing principles of a work. Conflict is an overdetermined one, or an overabundance of information that leads to lack of cohesion between the constituent parts of a work. He argues that the interplay between ambiguousness and conflict can be connected to the contradictions in Britten’s desires to be a stylistic innovator while maintaining the interest of broad audiences, and to the fact that he loved a country that did not accept his politics or sexuality. Forrest also posits that awareness of this contradiction can inform analysis of Britten’s music.

The essays that follow consider the contradictions of ambiguity and conflict outlined by Forrest. They are primarily analytical in that they each focus on a particular facet of Britten’s compositional style in a specific piece or selection of works. The first four chapters cover various aspects of Britten’s early development and his efforts to find an individual voice. Kevin Salfen explores how Britten synthesized the harmonic, melodic, and textual approaches of contemporary British composers, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century canonic continental masters, and twentieth- century modernists in A Boy Was Born, Op. 3 and A Ceremony of Carols, Op. 28. In doing so, Salfen positions the young composer between different sets of poles: England and the Continent, and tradition and modernism. Stacey Jocoy considers the influence of Britten’s teacher Frank Bridge in the Suite for Violin and Piano, Op. 6 and the Variations on a Theme by Frank Bridge, Op. 10. Like Salfen, Jocoy positions Britten between England and the Continent. She adds that Bridge’s attention to modernism and technical mastery led to Britten’s efforts to find his own style through a multiplicity of borrowed techniques drawn from his teacher as well as from Richard Strauss and Stravinsky. She argues that Britten’s time with Bridge facilitated the discovery of his own compositional style. Anne Kissel examines Britten’s development through the lens of his collaboration with another emerging artist, Peter Pears. The tenor would become the composer’s life-partner as well as the inspiration for many of his operatic roles. Kissel notes that as Britten developed as a composer, Pears was developing as a vocal soloist, and that their collaboration on the Michelangelo Sonnets formed their first major point of artistic intersection and forged their public identity. She also notes the ambiguity regarding the Sonnets’ themes of love and the artist, forbidden love, and the dichotomy of the public versus the private. These themes could all connect to Britten’s and Pears’s love for each other, which could only be publicly expressed in a coded

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019 language. Stuart Paul Duncan provides a convincing article on Britten’s exploration of metric priming and conflict in his early vocal music, including the Serenade for Tenor, Horn and Strings, Op. 31, Festival Te Deum, Op. 32, and the opera Peter Grimes, Op. 33. He includes a detailed historiography on the development of metrical analysis, and applies recent methodologies of examining meter to Britten’s music. In his study of “Old Joe has gone fishing” from Peter Grimes, Duncan indicates that metric conflict subtly demonstrates the title character’s alienation and why he will never “fall into step” with the Borough.

The fifth, sixth, and seventh chapters discuss Britten’s music in the context of a composer who has found his voice. Gordon Sly considers intervallic and motivic framing devices, particularly within the Serenade. He also examines how motivic devices permeate Britten’s song cycles, draws connections between Bartók’s and Britten’s uses of symmetrical structures, and argues how they connect to both the composer’s personal definition of redemption and larger themes of innocence lost and regained. Clare Sher Ling Eng discusses Britten’s use of the semitone in the Serenade and The Poet’s Echo, Op. 76, as well as the composer’s radical ambivalence in the face of his inner conflicts. Her study of The Poet’s Echo would have been strengthened by consulting the Russian text as well as Pears’ English translation. In his essay, Forrest mediates on the conflict between the human and the supernatural (or divine) in Britten’s works. He explains that like earlier composers of the nineteenth century, Britten pairs tonality with the mortal realm, and symmetrical harmonic structures with the immortal. The composer then juxtaposes these two systems in various ways depending on the narrative context of a particular piece. For example, the mortal and immortal spheres work for a common purpose in A Ceremony of Carols, but they are in opposition in The Turn of the Screw.

The final two essays consider Britten’s music in the context of his late style. Shersten Johnson focuses on the piano recitatives in Death in Venice to argue that they are the aging composer’s portrayal of the aging author Aschenbach. In these recitatives, the concept of conflict manifests in the duality between Apollo and Dionysus through the use of “white-key” and “black-key” pitch collections performed by different hands in the same register simultaneously. Johnson argues that the composer empathized with Aschenbach’s decline and utilized the character’s plight as an outlet for his own struggle with aging. Marianne Kielian-Gilbert’s essay on Death in Venice and Phaedra, Op. 93 covers the conflict between the passions and the intellect. She explains that, in order to showcase these different sides, Britten utilized symmetrical melodic inversion, odd-index sums group interval classes, and diatonic tonality to portray the rational; and the Gamelan (as an exotic other), even-index sums group interval classes, and the pitch-class set 016 to portray the irrational.

Essays on Benjamin Britten is a strong addition to the literature on the composer, particularly with regard to analysis. This investigation of Britten’s oeuvre incorporates new methods, covers multiple facets of his works, and effectively explains how he carried out his expressive ideas in his music. However, other details such as the performance and reception of his compositions, and the more general aspects of Britten’s position in the musical community of his time are given less attention, particularly in the essays on the works written after his compositional style had matured.

THORNTON MILLER University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019

Julian Hellaby. The Mid-Twentieth-Century Concert Pianist: An English Experience. London and New York: Routledge, 2019. xiv, 268 pp. ISBN: 9781472484864 (hardback).

This book, written by English pianist and academic Julian Hellaby, contributes research in the area of mid-twentieth-century English pianism. Set out as an academic paper, akin to a UK PhD thesis in layout and overall approach, it is clear in intent and overall structure.

In the introduction the author puts forth his criteria and selects as his focus six English soloists “who were commencing and then developing their careers between approximately 1935 and 1970” (4). Alongside these, there is a wealth of references to other performers. However, Hellaby’s choice of pianists seems to some extent artificial, if not problematic. More specifically, the parameters he sets require that the chosen artists be “well known and widely admired, not already firmly established as a concert artist before the time-period of the study, were consistently active, and had reasonably contrasting profiles in terms of repertoire and performance personality” (5). However, the omission of renowned pianists John Ogdon and John Lill does not feel justified by the author’s rather obscure assertion that “as international competition winners, [Ogdon and Lill] really belong to the generation of pianists that came after the one I am studying” (6). Also unsatisfactory is the comment that the existing biographies of Ogdon have thoroughly exhausted the topic, because biographies are by definition different in scope and intent from Hellaby’s own book. Ogdon (1937- 1989) won first prizes at the London Liszt competition in 1961 and at the Tchaikovsky International Competition in 1962 (jointly with Vladimir Ashkenazy). The younger John Lill (b.1944) gave his first recital in 1953 and performed under Sir Adrian Boult in 1962. In short, the international reputation of these two pianists and their dates make their exclusion feel arbitrary. Consequently, Hellaby’s otherwise very readable account of musical life in England during this time (Chapter 2, part 1) is limited.

The second part of the book is the most extensive out of the three, exploring how to start and sustain a concert career. This section provides an interesting historic overview of such mechanisms as can be gleaned from the careers of the pianists in focus. Usefully, it also compares past practices to current ones in England. Again, subjectivity seems to affect the choice of pianists from among the newer generation of soloists used here as “models for comparison” (6). Their selection is based on membership to organizations such as the New Generation Artists’ scheme run by the BBC (NGA), and their careers and experiences are discussed in the book under “career sustenance” mechanisms. Overall, many important pianists should have seen their names mentioned, to the extent that the actual choices offer a less varied, less brilliant view of the pianistic landscape. Ultimately, the specific choices as a whole raise questions about the catholicity of the perspective they offer concerning careers of soloists in the UK.

The third part of the book, entitled “Performance Practice,” offers a rather truncated discussion of pedagogy and the idea of an English school of pianism. This material offsets the problematic nature of choosing pianists as representatives of a perceived tradition and highlights the need for further extensive research in the field. One of the parameters stated is for the chosen pianists to be “English born and English trained” (4), in a clear effort to eliminate foreign influences (see 212- 213). This artificially forces the focus on English pianists who belong to the Tobias Matthay pianistic lineage, and leads to an imbalanced view of pedagogical influences as discussed in Chapter 6. Indeed, a more in-depth search of British pianistic lineages points to the wealth of

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019 different pianistic traditions concurrently present. This type of narrative is indeed missing here. The fact that German-born Matthay was a pupil of William Dorell (who was himself a pupil of Kalkbrenner and Stephen Heller in Paris) itself begs questions concerning the degree of divergence (or indeed emancipation) of Matthay's pedagogy from that of his received traditions.

Chapter 7 uses as its starting point Harold Schonberg’s view of British pianism as “closely allied to the classical school” of J. B. Cramer in the late eighteenth century and of Mendelssohn in the nineteenth century (175). The author adjusts “British” to “English” and then proceeds to interpret Schonberg’s reference to “the classical school” of English pianism as follows: “refined rather than flamboyant expression and one that emphasizes the primacy of the music above the presence and personality of the performance” (176).

Consequently, Hellaby analyzes selected recordings in order to confirm whether any interpretative differences can actually be detected among the pianists of his focal group, and whether they as a group indeed demonstrate common interpretative tendencies. The analyses then concern solo repertoire comprising shorter works and single sonata movements deemed representative of each artist in the group. These are next compared to recordings of the same pieces performed by a “control group of non-English pianists” dating from around the same time as the English interpretations. “All the usual audible aspects of performance” are used as parameters and the outcomes are summarized “as leaning either towards the classic […] thereby displaying Werktreuer tendencies […] or towards the non-classic” (178).

It is here that the author first introduces “tonal beauty” as a further salient trait of English pianism, defined as a subjective “aesthetic construct of beautiful tone” (214). He tries to validate this trait through his assertion that it received attention by both Matthay and Craxton. Hellaby describes how he devised an experimental project called “the tonal beauty project” (213) in order to objectify it and ultimately quantify it for inclusion in his analysis. To this end, he assembled six focus groups “of experienced pianists, other musicians, and piano teachers,” of a wide age span, and a variety of national backgrounds. A definition of tonal beauty was discussed and agreed upon among the participants at the start of the “experiment,” who then proceeded to score each piece heard “on a scale of 0-5, where 0 stands for least beautiful and 5 for most” (215). An overall tonal beauty score was then assigned by adding all the participants’ marks. Two playlists of eighteen recorded extracts of solo piano music were assembled (half by English pianists from the focal group and half by non-English). Arbitrarily, the first three groups heard the first playlist, the second playlist was heard by the fourth and fifth groups, whereas the sixth group heard a collection of the more highly-rated performances from both playlists. Fifty-four participants constitute too small a sample for statistically meaningful results. Moreover, the recordings used feature repertoire as divergent as Debussy, Mozart, and Scriabin, thus further compromising validity by not observing the earlier like-for-like comparison.

The author concludes that moderation is the common denominator for both tonal beauty as a trait and the English national temperament in general. Furthermore, he proposes that the English school is identifiable in performances that exhibit balance and moderation “expressed […] through the medium of beautiful piano tone” (217). He comments that modern piano performance has become more internationalized, although a propensity for said moderation modified by global perspectives still lingers. Matthay’s specific technique is briefly referenced in an effort to substantiate how, from a technical standpoint, he achieved a “recognisably English sound” (223). The chapter concludes almost abruptly with a brief discussion of dress code as an embodiment of interpretative attitudes (224). The book as a whole ends with an underwhelming seven-page

NABMSA Reviews Fall 2019 commentary on modern English pianists’ performance style that bemoans the current “waning of English pianism” (235).

NATALIE TSALDARAKIS City, University of London

NABMSA Reviews (ISSN 2377-2573) is published twice yearly by the North American British Music Studies Association (www.nabmsa.org). Individuals interested in reviewing or having their books reviewed should contact the chair of the reviews committee, Ryan Ross, at [email protected].

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